Boom or Bust:
Reflections Tonight on Texas High School Football #TXHSFB
Reflections Tonight on Texas High School Football #TXHSFB
(Houston) If all politics is local; well then, so is football. Whether
it’s pro, college, or high school, the closer you are to the action, the closer
the action is to your heart. Under Friday night’s warm, gentle breezes, Texans congregate
on either side of a grid-lined field, celebrating a game with deep roots in the
our state. It’s a stage not only for the athletes but for entire towns to
proudly exhibit their winning colors and traditions, despite the boom/bust
reality for many of these communities. The ultimate team game is the ultimate
town game.
The luminosity of the lights squelches competing
brightness, banishing the darkness of the world beyond the stands. The inky evening in the distance streaks shades of orange and black as the night envelopes the sunset; curly clouds above look cotton-candy pink against a faded-denim sky.
Stadium lights stand bunched together on soaring poles, like supernova lined inside an egg box. Swirling wildly around the bold contrast of black and white in the night sky, lights edged with a blinding penumbra, fly thousands of late summer bugs, legion around the 1500watt metal halide bulbs, bouncing off each other in a frenzy.
Stadium lights stand bunched together on soaring poles, like supernova lined inside an egg box. Swirling wildly around the bold contrast of black and white in the night sky, lights edged with a blinding penumbra, fly thousands of late summer bugs, legion around the 1500watt metal halide bulbs, bouncing off each other in a frenzy.
Dreaming of glory, searching for new heroes under the Friday
night lights; spectators are lost for a few hours at the end of a long grinding
week. Maybe they’ll see another runner like Eric Dickerson, another passer
like Matthew Stafford, or another kicker like Russell Erxleben? The rat, tat,
tat of drumlines, the warbly wah, boo-wap of the horn section, the cheers and
whistles during play: all repeat like fight songs echoing down through the
decades. We can all sing our alma mater. I’m not too old to remember the
freedom of roaming around under the stadium with packs of elementary school
hoodlums, caring much less about the game than our parents.
An oil boom in the 1950s led to the opening of Odessa Permian
High School in 1959, and 55 years later the oil boom/bust cycle, like a roller-coaster, continues. It has been 25 years since the book “Friday Night Lights”
[FNL] was published by De Capo press in 1990; written about the 1988 season.
The price for a barrel of oil was just as depressed back then, but TXHSFB was as
well-lit and well-funded as it is today. My high school in Dallas just lost a
home game for the first time in 84 contests; the streak started before many of
the players were born. It takes years of work to perpetuate that kind of success.
Splintered wood benches give way to smooth aluminum seating and
modern scoreboards, with replays and current statistics. During halftime the
cold hot dogs and bitter coffee have been replaced by fancy concessions such as
hot nachos and fruit smoothies. Entertainment by the cowboy hatted drill teams
with red lipstick and tasseled white boots have morphed into a striptease show
by scantily-dressed dancers. The players’ tight elasticized uniforms and Star
Wars helmets look like pro football teams but protect our little
boys from concussions: who thinks that head injury issues could ruin this
historic American game? The “gear” seems as conflicted as having multiple teams
in each district make the playoffs: we want to highs of powerhouse winning
teams, but we neither want head injuries nor the agony of defeat felt by kids
at the season’s end. It’s too high or too low?
Media coverage of TXHSFB has grown like the game’s big
lineman, many of whom are 300-pounds, a girth formally reserved for college or
pro. In the 25 years since the smashing success of Bissinger’s FNL, the steady
increase in magazines like Dave Campbell’s, bloggers like Angel Verdejo, tweets
by Dan Jenkins, commercials with the Boz, songs by Kenny Chesney, highlight
shows on TV hosted by Craig Way, and movies like Peter Berg’s, pushed the
popularity of high school football to a new level. High school coverage in the
70’s consisted of AM Radio and the back pages of Saturday's Dallas Morning News, with print the size of an IRS document. At the
same time, the U.S. imported 46% of its oil. Boom or bust?
TXHSFB is a family game, passed from decade to decade; for
example, in north Texas, Denison plays Sherman this fall for the 106th
time, missing only 3 games during WWII. Many things have changed but so much
has remained: sweeping runs, head-smacking tackles, few QBs with good arms; the
scream of “Dee-Fence” when the game is on the line.
Games bring together communities, allowing them to celebrate
success and teach young people how to plow through challenging situations. The spirit of competition shows
the collaboration and work ethic of future leaders, their effort and joy
floating over to the stands to encourage beleaguered, anxious parents.
The sport exists mostly in analog, its basics what we call
“blocking” and “tackling” in business when we want to illustrate the building
blocks of any project. But more than that, the diving into a pile for a fumble,
the clawing, grabbing and fighting of the interior line, the reaching high up
into the corner of the end zone for the impossible catch, these are the small
battles that represent everyday work, considered life and death in football. We
love the game because it’s real; it’s a team battling together. It’s both shiny
and brassy, but down and dirty; the highs and lows intoxicate us every Friday
night: boom or bust?
©Mark H. Pillsbury
